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Generation Z can continue to lip-synch away merrily—for now. The president reversed course on threats to ban TikTok, saying he’ll instead allow the Chinese-owned social-media app to sell to an American company, so long as it meets a September deadline.
The app has been dogged by fears that Beijing could use it to weaponize data against Americans. Here are two big stories from our writers to help contextualize this latest back-and-forth:
Michael Schuman, who’s covered China for 18 years, explains: “Bizarrely, what happens to this goofy video-sharing app targeted at teens is an indication of whether the two countries are headed toward renewed, if uneasy, cooperation or into a superpower standoff with potentially disastrous consequences for world peace and prosperity.”
Meanwhile, China is becoming the first surveillance superpower.
“The emergence of an AI-powered authoritarian bloc led by China could warp the geopolitics of this century,” Ross Andersen reports in our magazine.